In a May 2 statement, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) announced that Louisiana State University (LSU) filed a lawsuit against academic publishing company Elsevier for breach of contract on February 27. According to the complaint, Elsevier cut off the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine’s (SVM) access to content that was legally licensed by LSU Libraries. For many reasons, especially Elsevier’s often contentious relationship with libraries over the decades, this will be one of the more interesting cases to watch unfold.

The website repository Sci-Hub, which enables users to freely download scholarly articles that normally require institutional subscriptions or individual payments, has found itself at the center of a series of conflicts over the past year. Many publishers are increasingly angry at the theft of copyrighted material, with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) going so far as to censure an academic librarian for his comments on Sci-Hub during a panel at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Orlando in June.

On April 30 the academic publishing company Elsevier announced that it would be updating its article sharing policies. In a post on its website titled Unleashing the power of academic sharing, Elsevier’s director of access and policy Alicia Wise outlined a framework of new sharing and hosting policies, which include guidelines for sharing academic articles at every stage of their existence, from preprint to post-publication, and protocol for both non-commercial—that is, repository—and commercial hosting platforms.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has urged librarians and other interested parties to sign a petition calling for public access to all federally funded research, which was posted on the White House’s “We the People” website on May 21. If the petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it will be considered for action by the White House staff.

Elsevier has agreed that researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) can text-mine Elsevier content for a wide variety of purposes, including direct analysis for research, selection of excerpts for citizen science, and calculating statistics on the usage of research objects for open dissemination in research tools.

Scientific journal publisher Elsevier launched a pilot project testing peer review transparency as part of its ongoing Content Innovation project, the company announced on April 2. Review reports for articles in Elsevier’s Agricultural and Forest Meteorology will be published alongside the article on SciVerse ScienceDirect throughout 2012, provided they meet quality standards. If successful, the […]

This article has been updated to include information on the bill’s status and from ACRL. Scientific journal publisher Elsevier today withdrew its support for the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill which would have prohibited open access mandates for federally funded research. The publisher had been the target of a boycott among academics, as LJ […]